Read Online Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall - Free Book Online

“ ’Fore you go, bring me them smokes, girl, and the matches too.” She coaxed out a Marlboro with herlong red nails. “Light it up,” she said. “Go on. God, do I got to tell you six times? Put it ‘tween your lips. Now do the damn match.”
    But I wasn’t good at striking them, and pretty soon a lot of half-burnt matches lay on the floor. Finally, she showed me how to hold it, how to draw on the cigarette till I coughed, and the end sparkled and glowed.
    She might be drunk, but here was something no other kid was privy to. She took the thing and puffed away while the taste roared terrible on my tongue and in my throat. My tummy clutched up. Mama sent streams of smoke into the air.
    While I watched the rings, a noise rose up—not down the road, nor from the prison where sometimes a siren went off—but from across the bare field where weed stalks had long ago fallen and were stubby and wrecked.
    This was hollering and common horn honking, and at first it sounded like plain joy riding. I went to the front window and looked out at two pickups bouncing around in the prison’s far field. High school kids waved their arms and yelled, looking just like their daddies on a Saturday night.
    But then here they came—bumping across the road, lobbing things at the house, and I heard an upstairs glass break, and over that, the boys chanting something I could not make out.
    Then the words came clearer:
    “In a golden wig, she smelled like pig, and” —what was that next?— “wore her wedding gown!”
    Like a nursery rhyme, only ugly and cruel. They shattered bottles and thundered their good time, and here came more hits SPLOCK SPLOCK , and I opened the door. Color upon color ran down the wall. Something hit me in the chest and exploded into red paint and bits of balloon.
    Then one fired past me. I looked back through the door andsaw Mama cross-legged, and around her the stuff puddled, purple and thickening, on her floor.
    Then from the corner of my eye I also saw Auntie and wide Miss Shookie barreling across the empty lot, Auntie screaming and shouting and waving her fists. The boys took off in their fine pickups, bouncing back the way they had come, across the field and through the far trees.
    “Beware the ho’ with the painted do’!” Their voices spun out.
    Auntie stepped up on the porch and grabbed me by a hand. Miss Shookie peered into the house, like a voyeur.
    “Well, don’t that just make it, that red paint on the girl,” Miss Shookie said. “Puts me in mind of a scarlet letter.…”
    Auntie let go of me long enough to draw back a hard fist and sock Miss Shookie a good one.
    For a while after that, Miss Shookie and Bitsy didn’t come on Sundays, but then they started again, and we all took up like nothing had happened.
    Only it had.

11
    S ummers were too short, made worse by knowing September was ahead. Every August, I sat on the porch with my knees tucked up and, dry-eyed, cried my heart to death.
    Auntie had little patience with people who whined and felt sorry for themselves. But if I said nothing at the Sunday table, Miss Shookie picked at me like a dry brown scab. Uncle Cunny was different. He watched over us all. Reverend Ollie told his flock that God’s eye was on the sparrows. If that was true, maybe Uncle was God, come down to earth in a pin-striped suit. He smiled and he praised me, and he passed me the peas. I loved him with a heart so full that sometimes I worried that my aching might leak out.
    I sat in the itchy grass and watched Mama’s house. She hardly ever came out anymore, but probably laid up inside with her dress hitched high in front of a slow-moving fan.

    When I was ten, they made Miss Thorne principal, and she taught Year Five. I was in her class.
    Every morning, in charge, she stood outside to greet us, lookingdown at her broken porch steps over which someone had laid a length of plywood. But sometimes in January that old wood became slippery with frost so last winter Miss